Farmer hiring of agricultural machinery services is common in South Asia. Informal fee-for-service arrangements have positioned farmers so they can access use of machinery to conduct critical, time-sensitive agricultural tasks like land preparation, seeding, irrigation, harvesting and post-harvesting operations. However, both the provision and rental of machinery services are currently dominated by men, and by […]
The Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) was established in 2009 to support national and regional efforts to improve cereal production growth in South Asia’s most important grain baskets, including Bangladesh. CSISA works with public, civil society, and private sector partners in the development and dissemination of improved cropping systems, resource-conserving management technologies, new rice, wheat and maize varieties and hybrids, livestock feed supply chains, improved policies and markets, and public-private delivery systems.
IFPRI carries out the policy research agenda of CSISA, which seeks to promote evidence-based policy reforms to strengthen the institutions and markets required for continued adoption of sustainable intensification technologies and practices in disaster-prone areas. The policy agenda focuses on generating evidence, providing policy recommendations, and delivering technical assistance to key partners around four thematic areas: seed systems and markets; scale-appropriate mechanization; soil fertility management and fertilizer markets; and agricultural risk management.
Revolutionizing the collection of household data
This post was originally published on the IFPRI Research Blog. By Patrick Ward Can you recall how much money you spent on food last year? Or how many days of work you missed last summer? No doubt these are difficult questions to answer, especially if you are trying to answer off the top of your […]
Crowdsourcing real-time data for rural farmers
How can data be used to better understand market development, the spread of disease, or even the spread of ideas and innovations among rural Bangladeshi farmers? IFPRI-Bangladesh has been providing technical assistance to the one-year project Crowdsourcing Rural Data Collection, launched in northern Bangladesh in December 2015 by the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia. […]